The Grooms Wore Custom Jumpsuits—And an Unexpected Something Blue—At This Intimate Brooklyn Wedding
When Ryan Kazmarek, a hairstylist at IGK Salon in New York, met William Stautberg, a knitwear designer at Ralph Lauren, through a mutual friend at a Brooklyn Juice Press in 2017, Ryan felt an instant, energetic attraction. William, then a student at Parsons, gave a dazed “nice to meet you,” but was preoccupied with illustrating on his laptop. (“He doesn’t remember,” Ryan laughs of their first encounter.) Soon after, however, something clicked, “and I was completely obsessed,” William recalls. “Ryan’s a very timeless, easy-to-love kind of guy.” The pair bonded over their close relationships with their families and the passionate attention to detail they each bring to their careers. “When I do something, I want it to be a specific way,” Ryan says. “William’s exactly the same.”
Around six years later, Ryan proposed in the hills above Florence, where the couple was vacationing after William’s bi-annual work trip to the Pitti Filati yarn show. After a morning of vintage shopping in the tiny town of Settignano, Ryan got down one knee along the Arno River. “There was almost no one around and it was a very intimate moment,” William remembers, “except for one slow clap from someone on a rooftop in the distance.”
The grooms-to-be decided to plan their own wedding, approaching every aspect with creative zeal. The meticulous process began 10 months pre-proposal, with Ryan working closely with Brooklyn jeweler and metalsmith Jake Alfonzo to design William’s green sapphire and cognac diamond engagement ring. (Alfonzo’s three words of inspiration, according to William: “butch,” “antiquated” and “sporty.”) Upon their return from Italy, they consulted Alfonzo together and, after approximately 10 sketches, settled on an engagement ring for Ryan with cognac and champagne-colored diamonds.
The collaboration lit a spark of inspiration: “These rings are so beautiful,” Ryan said, “I felt like we needed to make the wedding match.”
William and Ryan scouted upstate New York’s Hudson area and considered City Hall before choosing the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn for their ceremony and reception venue. “We knew from the start that we wanted the wedding day to be warm, intimate, and specific,” William said. The textile factory-turned-boutique hotel offered a brick-and-ivy-lined garden terrace which felt ideal for the ceremony, and, significantly, “was just blocks away from where we met,” William says.
Wedding wardrobe quickly became a labor of love for William, who crafted his ceremony attire—and both his and Ryan’s reception looks—under his own Stautberg brand. “Right after we got engaged, I knew that I wanted to wear jumpsuits for the wedding and that I wanted to design and make them,” he says. William is a longtime aficionado of the powerful, full-body garment—his senior thesis at Parsons featured various interpretations, including trench and raincoat jumpsuits.
William’s overall vision was clear: “I wanted to play with bridal elements, but coming from a twisted menswear space.”
The 2009 Tom Ford-directed film, A Single Man, inspired the flowing-cape design of William’s ceremony jumpsuit. Watching “a scene where Julianne Moore is dancing with Colin Firth, wearing a black-and-white sleeveless crew-neck dress that has an amazing column-y cape off the back,” he said, “I knew exactly what I wanted to do.” He designed a classic menswear shirt with a pussy bow detail and, to ensure perfect shaping, a baby-blue boned corset top to wear underneath—another “caricature” of wedding convention, he notes, and the “cheekiest” of “something-blues.”
Though Ryan and William consistently questioned wedding conventions, they honored at least one custom. For “something old,” Ryan ordered vintage Chanel pearl cufflinks from the RealReal. William’s designs checked the “something new” box, while his grandmother’s emerald-and-diamond ring, a family heirloom, served as “something borrowed.” “I finally got the courage to ask her a few months before the wedding, and she was more than excited to lend it to me,” William says. “I’ve never been so excited to have tiny fingers.”
Ryan found the linchpin of his ceremony look during a stroll through Soho. “I walked into Louis Vuitton and saw a cream suit jacket with a criss-cross lapel and a little Dove brooch and I fell in love,” he said. “It also happened to be Virgil Abloh’s last collection for Louis Vuitton before his passing, so it was an incredibly special piece.” The statement jacket compelled him to wear all-white to the ceremony, including a Tom Ford shirt, Western-style boots from Alessandro Vasini, and a perfectly matching tie: “William sourced fabric and had Walter Schick at [New York neckwear company] Bentley Cravats make one for me,” Ryan said.
After separate welcome dinners with their families the Friday before their Sunday wedding (William at Le Crocodile at the Wythe and Ryan at MAMO), the couple held a small rehearsal dinner at Café Colette in Williamsburg on Saturday with the same small group that would attend the ceremony—their parents, grandparents, siblings and their best friend—followed by welcome drinks at Shelter to greet all of their out-of-town guests.
That weekend, New York experienced a deluge of “end-of-the-world rain,” William remembers. “It flooded torrentially on Friday, and rained all day on Saturday, but somehow everything faded off and we woke up Sunday morning to one of the most beautiful days ever.” Eschewing a first look, the couple walked side-by-side under clear blue skies to the Wythe, where they got ready together. “It s so ‘us’ to play dress up,” William says. “I wanted to be there and help each other,” Ryan adds, including being the one to lace up William’s corset: “He couldn’t do that by himself.”
The hairstylist entrusted his hair to Jacob Rozenberg, a close friend whose client list includes Irina Shayk and Karlie Kloss. “I had a couple of Austin Butler references,” Ryan laughs.
William and Ryan didn’t want to walk separately down the aisle —“or really have an aisle at all,” William says—so they headed into the ceremony together while a quartet played “Unchained Melody.” Florist Emily Thompson, whose work they admired from fashion shows like Jason Wu and Ulla Johnson, surrounded the terrace with autumn-toned chrysanthemums, bluebells, and dahlias. “I took inspiration from old oil paintings of floral arrangements,” Ryan says. The couple did not have a wedding party, and William made a joking addendum to their formal dress code: “No khakis within 50 feet of the building.” One of William’s oldest family friends ordained their marriage, and they wrote their own vows, with William movingly calling Ryan “human sunshine.”
